Acoustic effects of ceiling fans in home theater

...you should be worried about what it will do to the higher frequencies. (it causes a very distracting 'swish, swish swish... modulation to the sound)

I have a ceiling fan in my living room and I notice this all the time and turn it off when I'm listening to something that I care about.

Never noticed an effect at low frequencies.
si.

SSpivey has this right.

Also, your question assumes that the blades of the ceiling fan have a resonant frequency that will be excited by low frequencies from your speakers/subwoofer.

In my expereience, other things in the room will be vibrating before a ceiling fan.

Which parts of the ceiling fan do you think will be vibrating? The mounting? The shaft? The blades? Since all of these parts are connected, who knows what the resonance frequency of the entire ceiling fan is?

Those 52 inch blades have a good amount of mass.

Like SSpivey said, turn the fan off for critical listening to avoid the normal swishing sound of the fan. Other than that, I think you would be hard pressed to excite the fans resonant frequency enough to be audible.

It's a shame that Bruce Thigpen can't figure out a way to turn an ordinary ceiling fan into one of his "flat to 1 Hz" Rotary Subwoofers for about 10% of the cost of the TRW-17.

Understood. The blades of the fan are not going to rotate due to the air movement of your system. The mass of the blades is such that getting them to bend enough to make audible noise is not an issue. Again, this is significantly due to the fact that the blades are attached to other parts of the fan.

I will let someone with more expertise explain what the resonant frequency of the (attached) blades might be.

You might also turn up your system volume really high and stand under the fan and see if you can hear anything from the fan.

Any noise from the fan is almost certainly going to be masked by your audio system.

Low frequencies can be blown astray by fans, so I wouldn't use them when listening.

You just need a different type of ceiling fan, rather than the standard 5-blade design:

http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/...013+4294966199

or maybe something like this: http://www.fanimation.com/products/enigma/?group_id=95

Both can move lots of air, silently. I have the top one and even on its highest setting, it's damn near perfectly silent.

Hi kwkshift:

I guess my reading comprehension is failing. Seemed to me that the OP was trying to figure out what kind of resonances or other audible phenomenon there would be with the fan OFF. If I had to guess, I would say that the OP has central air for cooling.

I would guess you could say more than a few words about the lengths people can go to to minimize the noises from their central air units.

Sorry, 1stHD I didn't see that part.